Monday, May 24, 2010

Shoot to Thrill by P.J. Tracy (Mother/daughter team of Patricia J. and Traci Lambrecht)

Latest Monkeewrench novel

The FBI finds five videos on the internet that are of genuine murders. Agent John Smith, nearing retirement from the FBI's cyber crimes unit, comes to Minneapolis to hire Monkeewrench and other computer crackers to find who is posting the videos so they can catch the murderer or murderers. Magozzi and Rolseth get involved when a sixth murder happens in their jurisdiction.

The Monkeewrench team must create a program that can separate staged death scenes from the real thing. The first death they scrutinize appears to be the drowning murder of a Minneapolis drag queen. A stabbing, two shootings, and a strangulation are among subsequent killings that occur in other cities across the country. But then they discover that the murders are being preposted online so the chase is on to find the victims before they are killed. It gets pretty intense as one of the victims survives but is in a coma.

But as always it is the connections between the characters that the authors really shine. Plus it was nice that the storyline focused more on the detectives instead of the monkeewrench team and I really enjoyed the additional FBI characters of Smith and some of the other Minneapolis police. But I didn't see the ending coming at all and it made me smile.